Epic: Book 03 - Hero (30 page)

He screamed back.

Propelling himself forward, Scott pulled back his fist and swung at the beast. But to his surprise, he struck only air. The necrilid had moved out of harm’s way.

It was a moment so liberating that shockwaves pulsed through Scott’s veins as he landed again. The creature had leapt away. It had darted halfway across the room to avoid him.

It was afraid.

The other four Nightmen—Nicolai, Viktor, Dostoevsky, and Auric—charged into the open. Together, the five black knights stood in unison, the horns of the fulcrums stabbing through the dark. They stood like a pack of metal wolves.

Suddenly, something happened that none of them had ever heard or witnessed before. The necrilid let loose with an eerily long howl—a terrible, anguished scream.

Scott cocked his head with comprehension.
You’re telling them, aren’t you? You’re alerting the others. You’re warning them of an imminent threat.

The necrilid bounded away.

“
Oh my God,” said Viktor. It was the first time he’d ever sounded stunned.

No one challenged a necrilid. They were horrible creatures, made of razor sharp teeth and terrible claws. They were aggressive, rapacious monsters straight out of a nightmare. No one challenged a necrilid—until now.

“
Weapons out,” Scott said, as he re-aimed his rifle. The Nightmen around him followed suit. There was no need for unarmed bravado now—they’d needed to prove their point only once. Now the necrilids knew real danger. Danger that could beat them one on one. Scott bolted in pursuit of the retreating creature. He knew he couldn’t literally catch it—necrilids were faster than anything else. But he had a feeling deep in his gut—a feeling it was fleeing to the nest.

They met almost no resistance through the twisting corridors of Chernobyl. On occasion a necrilid surfaced, but lone necrilids were no match for five Nightmen. They fell without resistance.

“
Lieutenant,” Esther said over the comm, “do you need any help?”

Scott answered immediately. “Radio dark.” He didn’t want to hear Esther’s voice, nor anyone’s from the surface. This wasn’t EDEN’s mission—it was theirs. The slayers around him assumed radio silence, and no more transmissions came from the team outside.

The terrain inside the plant was impossible to predict. Oval rooms flowed into half-melted halls, which declined into ladderless tubes. Only one direction mattered at all: straight ahead full. The Nightmen surged down a solitary hall, longer than most they’d traversed. It opened ahead into a much larger space.

The screaming began. It came from every direction—from the ceiling and floor, from behind and in front. Bloodthirsty, predatory screaming. A chill passed up Scott’s spine.

“
Fortify, three-sixty!” Scott shouted. Behind him, Dostoevsky and Auric about-faced and dropped to their knees, while Nicolai and Viktor did the same, but remained facing front. Scott stayed in the center. Every direction was covered forward and back. With the freedom of the middle position, Scott could fire anywhere. They were a fortress of metal.

The screaming around them continued. Howling, snarling, and shrieking.

“
Come on!”
Scott challenged the beasts. He thrust up his E-35. “Amplify your helmets.” The Nightmen affirmed, adjusting their volume controls. When Scott spoke again, his mechanized voice blared like a megaphone.

“
Come on, we’re right here!”

Two necrilids appeared from behind. Dostoevsky and Auric cut them to the ground. Another pair appeared from in front, and Nicolai and Viktor opened fire.

This is it
, Scott thought.
This is the end.

They descended like a black avalanche. Two necrilids. Then ten. Then ten more. Assault rifles and shotgun blasts erupted from both sides as creatures sprang up, then toppled to the ground. Scott’s rifle blazed in every direction.

The attack went on for several more seconds before the rush of necrilids ceased. Their screaming continued, but no new creatures emerged.

Their first plan just failed. Keep on the offensive.
“Reload and advance!”

There was a burst of stomping and slamming, as assault rifles and shotguns were refreshed. The Nightmen fortress marched forward. Scott remained in the center as the larger room loomed ahead. Then he saw it.

It was cowering far down in the hallway—he almost missed it at first. Its small size made it harder to see. Then it was gone.

A necrilid hatchling.

“
The nest is ahead!” Scott bellowed. “State your count!” One by one, the Nightmen called out.

“
Eight!”

“
Six!”

“
Five!”

“
Eight!”

Scott himself had killed six. Overall, their fortified guns had dropped over thirty. They’d probably killed forty since they’d arrived at the plant.

The Nightmen pressed onward and the large chamber loomed nearer.

A pair of necrilids appeared from behind, and Dostoevsky and Auric opened fire. Above Scott, the ceiling gave way. He knelt, aimed upward, and fired. Another necrilid fell through to the floor.

They’re coming from above now. They’re dropping on us.

Panning his rifle in both directions, he fired a steady stream of waves through the ceiling. He could hear them scatter.

“
They’re in the ceiling! Open fire!”

He hadn’t needed to say it. The Nightmen swung their weapons high, unleashing a barrage of assault rifle and shotgun fire into the ceiling. Chunks of bloody debris cascaded around them. Corpses and body parts were littered about.

Proactive. Stay proactive! Stay one step ahead.

“
Advance forward!” The formation once again marched ahead. But Scott knew what was coming next.
Their attack from the sides and through the ceiling failed. Their next step is the floor.

It was a worst case scenario—and inevitable. The necrilids would destroy the humans’ footing, then tear them apart before they could stand. If they did that, the Nightmen were dead.

“
Burst forward, five meters!” It was a move they’d practiced innumerable times but never used in the field. “Move!”

Every Nightman leapt to his feet. They lunged forward like armored gazelles, diving into the large room ahead.

Behind them, innumerable claws tore away the floor, causing it to fold and collapse.

The five Nightmen hit the ground rolling—and still in formation. When they came out of their rolls, they were once again crouched on their knees, Scott once again in the middle. The entire fortification had moved. The moment Scott looked around, he knew it’d been done.

They’d just bashed in the door.

The room was crawling with necrilids, every one of them caught off-guard by the five raging knights. It was like charging a den full of lions and bludgeoning the predators before they could react. Without a moment’s hesitation, the Nightmen opened fire.

In the first ten seconds of the assault, necrilids catapulted in every direction. They dropped from the ceilings and walls. Hatchlings scurried for the protection of their parent monsters, only to be mowed down themselves. Bulbous eggs, clustered in heaps in the corners, exploded as projectiles shattered their shells. Unborn aliens oozed lifelessly to the floor.

All at once the necrilids’ panic came to an end. The adults, their numbers decimated in a matter of seconds, roared and leapt at the humans. Bullets struck the creatures in midair and some rolled lifelessly across the floor. But not all.

The first necrilid to break the fortification had come from the corner. Its desperate lunge had not gone unnoticed, but there was no time to take aim. The creature crashed into Viktor from behind, pushing the slayer-medic into the open. Immediately Nicolai shot the necrilid and Viktor fell back into place.

Next Scott was struck from behind. His rifle nearly flew from his grasp as he suddenly found himself on the floor, claws stabbing into his back. A shotgun slug saved him, and he took his place in the middle again.

The battle lasted for almost a minute. Necrilids were chopped down by streams of firepower, even as the fortress was breached. The fortification fought to hold on.

Then, as suddenly as everything had begun, everything ceased. Aliens stopped screaming, monsters stopped lurching. Skittering gave way to silence.

Scott froze as he scanned the room. Through the fog of gun exhaust, he could make out mangled necrilid bodies strewn across the floor. Their entrails pooled in the floor’s low points. But even more nauseous was the smell—a mixture of gunfire and innards. It was the sickest thing he’d ever inhaled. The silence was oppressive.

Auric was the first to speak. “Is that it?”

No one answered. It seemed too sudden to be over, and Scott knew better. Necrilids were smart enough to flee. They wouldn’t simply stay to be slaughtered. He asked the impossible question, “Does anyone have a count?” No one did.

As the smoke rose to the ceiling, the room began to clear. It was the bloodiest carnage Scott had ever seen. He felt surrounded by evil. Evil they’d annihilated, but evil all the same.

A hatchling emerged from the corner. Auric’s shotgun blew it away. All was still again.

Scott considered the situation.
They aren’t all dead. They can’t all be dead. Some of them would have tried to escape.

“
I think we killed them,” Nicolai said, sounding surprised.

“
Stay in formation.” Scott had no idea how many necrilids still remained in the plant. Even an exact body count would mean nothing. What if this was one nest of ten? He knew exactly what he had to do.

Comm The Machine.

He adjusted his helmet and opened the link, ending radio dark. “This is Lieutenant Remington of the Fourteenth. We have uncovered and isolated a necrilid nest in Chernobyl Nuclear Plant. Requesting instruction.”

What to do next? Somehow, storming the rest of the compound seemed premature. He hadn’t had a chance to think this far ahead.

NovCom was quick to reply. “Hold your position, lieutenant. The Tenth is en route to your location.”

The Tenth. That was the four slayers’ original unit. Scott knew why they were coming, and he was willing to bet that a team of scientists was coming, too.
Novosibirsk
didn’t want to clean out Chernobyl. They wanted to own it.

Once again, Scott listened to the silence. For the first time, the thought entered his mind.
What if we did kill them all?
He knew better, but he wondered just the same.

“
What do we do?” Nicolai asked.

It was Commander Dostoevsky who answered. “We wait for the Tenth.” The fulcrum commander said nothing else.

Scott turned to look at Dostoevsky.
You wouldn’t have had the nerve to do this, would you? You wouldn’t have had the courage. You’d have left Chernobyl a mess for someone else to clean up.

Dostoevsky looked away.

The wait for the Tenth lasted barely twenty minutes, when word of the unit’s arrival came from the
Pariah
. Scott’s earlier thought had been correct: an entire crew of scientists had come along, too.

It was another fifteen minutes before the Tenth arrived at the necrilid nest. There were twenty-four operatives from the unit in total, and just under a dozen scientists. None of them reported seeing any creatures on the journey, though it was obvious by their expressions that the sheer number of dead necrilids there stunned them. After the initial uncomfortable silence, an exchange of more jovial nature took place between Viktor, Nicolai, Auric, and their former comrades in the Tenth.

A fulcrum elite approached Scott to begin his own exchange. Scott couldn’t see the man’s face—everyone was still hidden by their helmets—but he did catch the man’s nametag. His name was Axelos. Scott recognized him as the Tenth’s captain.

“
Remington, how did you accomplish this?”

“
We were aggressive,” Scott answered firmly. “We came in hard before they could react. We forced them on the defense.”

Axelos looked about the room, then turned to Scott. “I have never seen this many dead necrilids before. There must be a hundred.”

Scott knew there were not a hundred. But the tally might have pushed as high as seventy or eighty. The significance of the event hadn’t escaped him. “We learned a few things. They mimic human sounds. They also recognize danger. That can work to our advantage.”

Axelos laughed under his breath, casting a sidelong look to Dostoevsky. After confirming that the commander was out of earshot, he whispered to Scott. “Now that Clarke is out of the way, it is inevitable that the Fourteenth will be yours.”

For a moment, Scott was taken aback. He’d completely forgotten about Clarke’s death.

“
I wish to train my men with you,” Axelos said. “If I recall, you used to train with the Eighth. Will you have my unit instead?”

But now Scott’s mind was stuck on Clarke. He was shocked by his own numbness to the captain’s demise. A familiar knot formed in his bowels.
I did all this after the captain was dead. I didn’t even stop to think about it. I didn’t even acknowledge his death.